Prayer is Good Medicine said Dr. Larry Dossey, M.D. when he joined The Zoh Show
on September 5, 1996 and in the title of his latest HarperCollins book subtitled,
How to Reap the Healing Benefits of Prayer. Larry Dossey has devoted his life
to the conscious evolution of returning medicine to the holy art that it once
was. Through his work and writings, he strives to create a place where love, technology,
reverence for the divine and physical skills combine to facilitate a souls
declaration that my body and the universe are one.
The sacred art of healing
The sacred art of healing has been a frequent topic on The Zoh Show including
many earlier conversations with Dr. Dossey when he discussed his other illustrative
books: Healing Words, Recovering the Soul, Space, Time and Medicine, Meaning and
Medicine, and Beyond Illness.
Zoh asked Dr. Dossey what the purpose was behind this latest book, Prayer is Good
Medicine: How to Reap the Healing Benefits of Prayer. Simply to be a good
scientist and a good doctor, said Dr. Dossey, and to follow our wisdom
and our knowledge as far as it can take us. Fortunately Dr. Dossey is not
afraid of the little four letter word he calls d-a-t-a. Unlike many
medical doctors, he is not afraid of the host of scientific and statistical studies
showing that if you pray for me, the chances are, statistically, that I
am going to do better... There is no getting away from it.
He showed how a compassionate and prayerful approach to life can radically alter
its course, and thereby influence not only yourself, but the people around you
to whom you extend love, either through prayer or compassionate acts of kindness.
Dr. Dossey launches into a story of Abraham Lincoln growing up on the frontier.
He knew that he had a great work lying ahead of him, but it wasnt
really clear to him what this great work might be. He was interested in the law,
however, but there were no law schools on the frontier, so he was sort of stuck.
And then one day, a poor beggar came by Lincolns log cabin and offered to
sell him a barrel of junk for one dollar. Lincoln had no use for a barrel of junk,
but with his characteristic kindness gave this man a dollar and the man gave him
the barrel of junk.
Well, Lincoln set it aside and it wasnt until several weeks later
that he decided to go through it. Close to the bottom he found a complete, two
volume set of Blackstones Commentaries on the Law. This was the major law
book of the day and really gave Lincoln a major thrust forward in his life. And
it wasnt just Lincolns life that was transformed by this little act
of compassion and kindness and love. As we all know, the lives of generations
of people who came after him, and even the course of the nation, was changed by
a small act of love, one of the most focal factors in prayer. Love really can
change the world.
How to Pray
According to the clinical studies, added Dossey, there are statistical differences
between the various ways of praying. The two major divisions of how to pray are
the directed and the non-directed approaches. The directed form of prayer is where
you try to direct the outcome of your request: you pray for something specific,
you pray for the heart disease to get better or the blood pressure to come down,
etc. The non-directed form of prayer, however, is more surrendering to Thy
Will Be Done: youre really not asking for anything specific, youre
not trying to tell the universe what to do.
Dr. Dossey described two studies that put the two different prayer methodologies
to the test and concluded: the bottom line is that both of these methods
work. This is what I choose to emphasize here. There isnt a formula, there
isnt one way to pray, that knocks the socks off of all the other methods.
He therefore recommends that people look inside themselves to find out what is
best for them. A lot of people will feel more comfortable using an extroverted,
directed form of prayer where you spell it out and try to make it happen. Other
introverted people will feel more comfortable using a thy-will-be-done approach.
The Placebo Effect?
Zoh pointed out that many practitioners in the medical field believe that the
positive effects from prayer on a persons health can be explained by the
placebo effect, an argument Dr. Dossey easily refutes. Many of the 150 studies
that have been done to date, he points out, were double blind studies, meaning
the individuals who were being prayed for didnt know they were getting the
prayer. If they dont know they are being prayed for, it is hard to
say that this is a placebo effect -- because for placebos to be active, youve
got to know you are taking one because this triggers the effects of suggestion
and expectation and positive thinking. But even more convincing than unaware
humans are the studies that have been done using prayer on animals and lower forms
of life such as bacteria. Since rats and mice and bacteria [presumably]
dont think positively, you know theyre not susceptible
to the placebo response. So if they grow faster or heal quicker when they get
prayed for, you are not going to be able to explain this away by saying it was
just a placebo.
One study followed 393 patients in the coronary care unit of the San Francisco
General Hospital, and Dr. Dossey said he thinks its a study that will go
down in history as one of the most significant studies of prayer in the 20th Century.
It established a principle to test prayer in the hospital just like you would
a new medication. These 393 patients had all been admitted into the coronary care
unit with a heart attack or severe chest pain, and all were treated with state
of the art coronary care. Unknown to them, however, said Dr. Dossey,
about half of these people had their first names farmed out to various prayer
groups around the United States. Since this was a double blind study the doctors
and the nurses and the patients did not know who was and who was not getting the
prayer. In the end? There were fewer deaths in the prayed-for group,
and in the group who did not receive the prayer twelve people had to have the
tube put down their throat and they wound up on the mechanical ventilator. In
the prayed-for group, no one had to have this done. They also required fewer potent
drugs and medications.
Dr. Dossey concludes assuredly that if the results of this study had been from
a new medication for heart attacks, it would have been called a modern medical
breakthrough! However, since pharmaceutical companies havent figured out
how to bottle prayer and market it, that didnt happen. But this study finally
disputed the claim that prayer is a matter of belief and fantasy and could not
be proven effective.
Talking to Yourself
Many people have a preconceive notion of what prayer is and Dr. Dossey has realized
that most Americans say prayer is: talking out loud or to yourself to some
sort of white, male parent figure who prefers to be addressed in English.
Although it sounds cynical, he continued, if you took a poll, this is the image
that would pop up most frequently, which is absurd because most people around
the world arent white, they dont speak English, and a lot of them
dont worship a male god. So unless you rule out huge portions of the worlds
population, we have to broaden our definition of prayer. Prayer is simply communicating
with the absolute and Dr. Dossey invites everyone to define what communication
is for them: it could be using words, it could be using silence or entering the
void, simply meditating and doing nothing, or simply a way of being. We also need
to allow people to define what the absolute is: it could be a male god, it could
be the universe, it could be a sense of majesty and beauty and order and process
and unity and pattern. The absolute actually is beyond all definitions. Dr. Dossey
wants to spread the concept of prayer very broadly to be big enough to take in
almost everybody.
The Body Doesnt Know The Difference
It appears that the body doesnt differentiate between prayer and meditation,
and in essence the goal is to elicit experiences of love and the feelings of hope.
It is unfortunate, noted Dr. Dossey, that many in organized religions in our country
consider meditation a dirty word. They sense it as something oriental,
eastern and pagan, but as a study at Harvard Medical School by Dr. Herbert Vincent
showed, the body cant tell the difference between meditating and praying.
In both cases the blood pressure comes down, the heart rate comes down, you become
restful. The body loves both states, so it doesnt matter if you call it
meditation or prayer, its good for the body.
Hope or Hopelessness Can Push the Tissue Around
The feelings of hope and hopelessness also directly affect our bodily functions.
As Dr. Dossey says, these are not just flimsy emotions that stay in your
head somewhere above your clavicle. Most people think hope, compassion, love,
hopelessness and so on are just feelings, just emotions. There is a biochemistry
to hope, a biochemistry to compassion and love. Biochemical changes do occur
in the neurotransmitters and receptor cites in the brain, but the key point, stresses
Dr. Dossey, is that there are actual nervous connections, endocrinological
connections, hormone connections, and biochemical connections between those parts
of the brain and probably every other cell in your body, so that when you sense
hope or hopelessness, or you sense love and compassion or even other emotions
such as humor or good nature, these changes in these sensations and emotions trigger
events that probably influence every other piece of tissue in your body. Its
no exaggeration to say that hope or hopelessness enters the body and pushes the
tissue around. Sometimes this makes the difference in life and death. We are talking
big time changes here, we are not just talking emotions and feelings.
Do Doctors Pray?
Most hospital patients wish their doctors would pray for them as discovered by
Dr. David Larson at the NIHs Health Care Research in Rockville, Maryland.
Dr. Larson and his colleagues at NIH have been doing surveys looking at the prayer
habits of American physicians. Surveys show that anywhere from 15-50% of American
doctors actually do pray for their patients. As Dr. Dossey noted, there
is probably more prayer going on behind the scenes in American hospitals than
we know anything about. But it wouldnt be the patients who minded
if this were made more public. Dr. Larsons survey of hospital patients showed
75% said I would love my doctor to pray for me and he should be concerned about
my spiritual welfare. In fact 50% of these people said that they thought their
doctor ought to pray not just for them, but actually with them. Apparently there
is a tremendous urge on the part of the American people to have doctors involved
in prayer.
In Prayer is Good Medicine: How to Reap the Healing Benefits of Prayer Dr. Dossey
also relates the results of praying for corn in Iowa. Reverend Carl E. Goodfellow,
considered a kind of modern saint by Dr. Dossey, is a Methodist minister in Gutenberg,
Iowa who prayed for the farmers of his state. He became interested in some of
the experiments showing that prayer seems to increase the germination rate and
growth characteristics of seeds and decided to ask the people in his rural congregation
to pray for an increased bountiful harvest in their area of Iowa. They divided
up some of the farm plots, prayed for some and not for the others, and the prayed-for
side yielded more than the un-prayed-for side. They then expanded their experiment
to include all of the farms in that part of the state, and now they are praying
for all of the farms in Iowa. Theyve also decided to expand the program
to pray for a decrease in the rate of farm accidents in the entire state. Farming
is a very hazardous occupation and accidents take a tremendous toll every year.
Rev. Goodfellows group has enlisted statisticians and the help of scientists
at the University of Iowa to keep track of the data to demonstrate their effectiveness.
This is a wonderful example of how someone is putting this to work in actual
life, notes Dr. Dossey. Prayer can actually make changes in the state
of the physical world, including corn fields in Iowa.
Pets Love Unconditionally: Is That Prayer?
There is also an interesting relationship between pets and prayer which Dr. Dossey
realized when he began to think about love and the role of compassion and acceptance
in prayer. Love is a very powerful factor, and if you had to single out
one factor that accounts for why prayer works, it probably is the role of love.
Do you really care? Do you really have compassion for who it is you are praying
for? Anybody who has ever had a pet knows that pets have love. They accept you
unconditionally, on no terms whatever. So, I just began to wonder whether or not
pets are actually engaging in some form of prayer? And I think the answer is yes
-- they certainly are good healers! Studies have shown that people who have heart
attacks who have a pet survive in greater numbers than people who dont.
Theres all sorts of studies with pets exercising healing influences over
us and I think that because love is very important in prayer, it suggests that
pets engage in some sort of prayer.
Prayer Is Good Medicine
Dr. Larry Dossey, M.D. has done so much to advance humanitys appreciation
for the act of love and the art of prayer and healing. We recommend everyone read
his latest book, Prayer is Good Medicine: How to Reap the Healing Benefits of
Prayer, HarperCollins. Call 1-800-331-3761 to order it by phone if your local
bookstore does not have it. Not only are Dr. Dosseys comments wonderfully
enlightening and helpful for many people, but there is also a terrific resource
list and bibliography at the end of the book. His interview on The Zoh Show 9/5/96
is available for $10.00.